Duggie Fields

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Duggie Fields grew up in the English countryside. He first came to notice in 1958, when he was 14, in the Summer Exhibition at the Bladon Gallery, Hurstbourne Tarrant. He was studying at the nearby Andover Grammar School.

Fields briefly studied architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic before embarking studies in 1964 at the Chelsea School of Art for four years. He left with a scholarship that took him on his first visit to the United States, in 1968. As a student, Fields' work progressed through minimal, conceptual and constructivist phases to a more hard-edged post-Pop figuration. His main influences were at that time Jackson Pollock, Mondrian and comic books, with a special regard to those worked on by Stan Lee. In 1968, after his US visit, Fields went to live in Earls Court Square and shared a flat with Syd Barrett, who had just left Pink Floyd. Fields still lives in the same flat and he works in Barrett's former room using it as his atelier.[2][3]

By the middle of the 1970s his work included many elements that were later defined as Post-modernism. In one painting Marilyn Monroe is shown with her head severed off.[4] In 1983 Fields was invited by the Shiseido Corporation to Tokyo, where a gallery was created to show his paintings. For the occasion the artist and his work were simultaneously featured in a television, magazine, billboard and subway advertising campaign throughout all Japan.[5]

In 2013, he was taken to Los Angeles by artist and benefactor Amanda Eliasch with fashion designer Pam Hogg for Opfashart, which Eliasch had put together for "Britweek".[6]

From 2013 to 2015, Fields worked for the preservation of Earls Court Exhibition Centre designed by architect Howard Crane and the surrounding area. The campaign was not successful but made people aware of the general decline of architecture in the London area.[7][8]

2016 Duggie Fields was celebrated by the British Film Institute FLARE with a collection of his videos,[9]
Mr Fields could have been responsible for the Free the Nipple Campaign and was the designer of posters for London Transport [10][11]